Reviewers of documents often write annotations in the margins of pages of the documents that are being read. These annotations can indicate a reviewer's thoughts on a particular passage in a document, can highlight a portion of the document that the reviewer finds important, etc. Thereafter, if the reviewer subsequently reviews an annotated document, the reviewer can quickly locate portions of the document that the reviewer previously found to be important and can review annotations in the margins to refresh the memory of the reviewer.
In a particular example, a researcher (one who is researching a particular topic to generate a research paper) can read numerous documents and can annotate several of such documents in connection with generating a new research paper that is germane to the topics that are discussed in the documents being reviewed by the researcher. When composing the resulting research paper, the researcher can review the multiple annotations made to the documents for purposes of citation and analysis.
In another example, students often annotate text books or articles in an effort to improve memory regarding a particular topic that is discussed in the text book or articles. Thus, when a student attempts to commit a particular topic to memory, the student need not re-read the entire portion of a textbook, but can quickly review previously made annotations.
Some word processing applications have been configured with functionality that supports the addition of annotations to documents, wherein such annotations can be stored as part of the documents. For example, the user can highlight a particular portion of an electronic document and then choose to add a comment to such portion of the electronic document. The comment, for instance, may be displayed in a bubble in a margin of the electronic document. Additionally, some web-based applications allow users to assign tags to web pages, images, or the like. For example, a user can choose to bookmark a particular web page, assign descriptive terms to the bookmark, and then cause such bookmark to be shared with others by way of a web-based application. Other forms of tagging include the addition of metadata to documents in order to introduce information to machine learning systems for training. It can be ascertained that these systems that facilitate annotating documents are restricted to user-initiated tags. Accordingly, for a large document collection, this tagging process can be relatively inefficient. Moreover, typically tags assigned by users to documents are in the form of an unstructured text string, which makes processing these annotations cumbersome.